I am begging presses of weird, bizarro, "dark fantasy", grimdark, oddball and Dark Science Fiction to realize that horror is not a bad thing, and to actually understand that yes, most of what they publish is already horror.

"we're interested in [a bunch of things commonly found in horror] but not horror" look i'm not trying to be mean here, but please get over yourself. what is with the aversion to publishing and marketing horror?

Let's all get a reality check in here. Elric of Melnibone is horror. Hellboy is horror. Lovecraft is horror and so are a bunch of the Lovecraft-adjacent things. Middlegame is certainly horror-adjacent. Ninth House is horror.

Marketing your "weird fiction" and "dark fantasy" as not-horror just makes it hard for horror fans to find it, and easy for people who Don't Like Horror to get really, really turned off.

Horror does not have to be schlocky and pulpy. (And even when it is, that can be fun and you can again, get over it.) Like, you do not have to sneer and get snooty about Goosebumps and Stephen King and Christopher Pike when you have the same audience.

And just. Please. If I see ONE MORE PRESS do the "we don't want horror!" thing when they are CLEARLY envisioning like, Nightmare on Elm Street and /nothing else/, but adore dark fantasy elements, I will start flipping tables.

The best part is that I'm sure I'll have people challenging me on Elric being horror, and see, the second I recategorized it from dark fantasy to horror in my head, I was MUCH MORE OKAY with those books. And then I looked at the influences! All the influences are horror books!

This is like the flipside to "all queer books are romances" - "we will steal horror tropes and cliches and then dismiss the entire genre as something it is not"